Quoted from Mr. Scoble (who is not specious):
“I do note that Google’s stock is up. Yahoo and Microsoft’s are down.”
The market believes this can work. Long-time readers will know that I am a believer in the Wisdom of Crowds. As the book says, when they’re properly orchestrated, the masses can make better decisions than experts. Stock Markets are not ideal examples of this, I think, since reputations and rumour holds sway; success breeds success and vice-versa, but they come close in some respects.
What made YouTube so madly successful? Clips from copyrighted TV? People doing crazy stunts? Talented pets? All of those things. What made YouTube work was that it was “the place”. It was the corner of the park after 7pm; it was the back of the bike sheds; it was where to go. It was where to waste some time; it was where to find stuff to stick on your page and mail to your friends.
The technology doesn’t matter; it never did. YouTube’s technology was ripped off a thousand times in the first year. Like others have said, though, you can’t clone a community. There may be a thousand digg clones, but there’s only one digg. YouTube has the community; none of the others do.
That said, I think that Mark Cuban had a good point when he said that anyone who bought YouTube would be morons in for a hard time from ambulance copyright-chasing lawyers. Like he said, a large,wealthy owner will invite litigation in a way an independent, poor owner won’t. But I don’t care.
What I care about is what does this mean for/about Web 2.0?
Sensible media owners will court GooTube rather than sue it. This will be the model for all the mainstream’s interraction with social media. I see advertisements and press releases daily from firms hoping to get their clients to embrace social media. There is an enormous market for this sort of thing. Google knows that, that’s why they bought the company. If they couldn’t think of a way to create AdSense for Video, that works through deep search on the content, then they wouldn’t have bothered. Look forward, hipster viral marketeers to having your adverts paid-per-view when they go on YouTube. YouTube didn’t have the capacity or know-how to scan video for stuff that should be paid for. If Google doesn’t, I’d be very surprised.
And does your company really want to sue the best channel to advertise any future moving picture project? I show 5 minutes of your show in a shakey, Flash-projected, low-resolution player. If your show is any good, have I helped you or hindered you?
Web 2.0 is now legit. YouTube, perhaps more than any other 2.0 startup, was the one that made people say “yeah, yeah — very fancy, but you haven’t got a business model”. Paul Graham’s idea, that if you make something that people really want, then the money will come has almost been proven. Being bought isn’t the same as having a successful business, sure, but YouTube’s social capital plus Google’s intellectual capital sounds a pretty convincing bet to me. (more reasons why this can work here).
MySpace has already done it (IMHO NI should have bought YouTube first: it’s an equally strong synergy) — they’re scheduled to become profitable right now, and have double the profits in twelve months. The ‘advertisers don’t want to be there’ argument is wearing thin already. How much more so when brands wake up to the fact that it’s the only way they’re going to reach 13-24s?
Web 2.0 is now mainstream. Yahoo grabbed del.icio.us and flickr. Google already has Writely and has launched Maps, Spreadsheet and other 2.0 products; their search is arguably 2.0 on its own. MS Live is deeply influenced by 2.0. But wasn’t/isn’t YouTube the most anarchic, freedom-loving, commie-pinko-loving 2.0 service of them all? Google can’t screw it up. That would be $1.65bn down the pan. They need to think of a way to embrace it. Damn me if their lawyers already haven’t [insert future legal ruling allowing YouTube stuff here].
Google wouldn’t have bought YouTube if they thought it would adversely affect their stock. Big companies don’t work like that. It didn’t. What Google, YouTube and the rest of us know is that this is the way forward.
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If they had spent $1.6B on college scholarships for poor African and other 3rd wolrd students then they could have made a big difference.
Google has a charity arm -
They have donated $1bn to google.org which does the sort of thing you’re talking about.
Check out this link:
http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2006/09/googleorg_seeks.php
Is that worth $1.6 billion? No, because YouTube has no base of paying customers. For all the hype of Web 2.0 and other nonsense, there is no better indicator of a bad business than an absence of paying customers.
YouTube has a tremendous potential. I think it could become as important as CNN. And it may become an advertising venue. But so far, this is all only potential.
The challenge ahead is for Google to convert a potentially disruptive form of media into a real business.
Some of the questions Google and any other buyer of a mega-acqusition must ask itself:
* What is it about this merger target that consumers value and pay for?
* What are the special attributes of this business that advertisers value and pay for?
More questions at:
http://www.ondisruption.com/my_weblog/2006/10/16bmerger_whats.html
Well, from that perspective Google has no paying customers…
Agreed, though, that monetising YouTube does face challenges to make the most of its potential. I think there are many ways it could do this, which aren’t so very difficult to figure out.